Some Spectacular Dresses and an Awful Lot of Running
by Shrrgnien
Summary: Another 50 themes, this time about the Paternoster Gang and their many adventures with and without the Doctor.


**Completion**

Jenny is sweet and respectful and Vastra is careful to mention often and warmly that she has no complaints about her service; but she misses the fire and the frankness she had so briefly seen in the girl's eyes, and she wants more than anything for Jenny to see that she is so much more than she lets herself become.

**Freedom**

It takes almost a full year of Vastra being really quite unforgivably rude to her poor parlormaid for Jenny to finally snap; at the end of her blistering tirade she clamps both hands over her mouth and looks nothing short of horrified, but Vastra is smirking and her eyes are warm when she says "_It's about time_," and Jenny feels something dark and chained-up inside finally break free, and it is beautiful.

**Moon**

Eventually Strax is forced to concede that there is, in fact, no one living there.

**Clouds**

There's an unusual amount of rain that year, even for London, and that's saying something; Jenny is worried for the Doctor, they all are, and she is genuinely sorry for his pain, but as she struggles to stop the groceries from dissolving into vaguely bread-flavored mush she can't help thinking uncharitably that the next time he comes down from his bloody cloud she's going to_ kill him_.

**Rain**

If she doesn't drown first, that is.

**Comfort**

The leather catsuit is easier to move in and easier to hide in and thus Jenny wears it when she needs to, but she's always felt much more comfortable in her old maid's uniform; Amy or the Doctor might make something philosophical or significant out of that but really the leather just _chafes_.

**Bonds**

The captured soldiers—if you could really call them that, as Vastra pointed out, when they had surrendered quicker than breathing to a young maidservant from 19th century London—complained loudly about how tight Jenny's knots were; one of them asked where the _hell_ she learned to tie like that, and Jenny didn't even have to look to tell Vastra to wipe the bloody smirk off her face, she learned it dressing chickens.

**Sky**

Vastra surrounds herself with windows and glass ceilings, which scares Jenny half out of her mind because her mistress is brilliant but scatterbrained and she's afraid someone will see her through the window; but Vastra has been in hibernation for thousands of years and she woke up underground, and she can't help wanting to see even London's miserable gray sky as often as she can.

**Fear**

Demon's Run isn't small, but it's not particularly large either; still, the thirty-second run from Dorium's control room to the main floor seems interminable when every second Vastra expects the trap to be sprung, with the Ponds and the child and her Jenny thinking they were safe.

**Socks**

Socks, Jenny explains patiently for the thousandth time this week, are not an alien race sent to destroy Earth; later they discover a tribe of nomadic blue creatures from the Tau Ceti system that build their own houses like hermit crabs and have a fondness for human cloth, and Vastra gives her a terribly judgmental look until she apologizes to Strax.

**Sun**

They're called away by the Doctor in the middle of a particularly miserable winter; to New New Earth, as it turns out (there were a great many more 'New's but then there was also a large telepathic tentacle creature and Jenny has priorities) and she has to patiently remind her wife that no matter how happy she is that it's summer here, she still has to wear _clothes_.

**Name**

It's always "Madame Vastra and her assistant what's-her-name-nice-girl-rather-pretty" but really Jenny prefers it that way; you can't throw a stone in the air in London without it bouncing off the head of one Jenny and hitting three more on the way down, so when she goes undercover she gets the unique pleasure of introducing herself as 'I am here to cause your downfall and humiliation, and potentially the destruction of an intricate interstellar reign of terror' and have nobody bat an eye, because all they hear is "Jenny Flint, sir, if it please you."

**Potatoes**

For all that he's been torn through time and space from a wildly different world, Strax is quick to take a charmingly British fancy to fish and chips; Jenny can't help but find something about the situation fundamentally unsettling.

**Light**

Jenny assumed Silurians could see in the dark; Vastra, as it so happened, assumed the same thing about humans and they almost fell into the Thames before they realized the mistake.

**Happiness**

Once the telepathic tentacle monster—who is named Farentigafruth and is actually quite sweet and helpful now that her eggs have been safely removed from beneath the broadcast tower—has been dealt with the Doctor is off again, taking Clara on a whirlwind adventure through New-to-however-many-degrees York; Vastra and Jenny immediately set up camp directly outside the TARDIS doors because it would be _just like_ the Doctor to forget them in his giddiness.

**Enterprise**

Jenny muses, as she lounges half-asleep in the sun-filled greenhouse/conservatory with her head in Vastra's lap and a bowl of chilled grapes beside them, that she should probably feel guilty; but no, she decides as her wife's fingers twine idly through her hair, getting Strax to declare war on the dust mites is the best idea she's had in years.

**Worry**

Jenny sits bolt upright when she realizes she's been dozing for hours and hasn't heard Strax's battle cry in at least thirty minutes, because that means he's finished dusting and has moved onto something _else_ and before Vastra can ask what's wrong her wife is already halfway across the house in a futile attempt to rescue the potted plants.

**Trapped**

Strax looks up and shrugs helplessly as Jenny struggles against her own lungs, and Vastra has never felt more acutely the horrific technological restrictions of the era, or her own helplessness.

**Telephone**

She tries to call the Doctor and is forwarded to River Song; the archaeologist tries and fails for two days to contact her husband and finally tells Vastra that he won't speak to her, either.

**Heaven**

Jenny wakes up.

**Hell**

She's delirious, half-blind with exhaustion and burning up; she tells Vastra three times that she loves her and it can't help sounding like goodbye.

**Breathing**

Victorian London, in the home of a human doctor; Vastra sits by Jenny's side every moment she can but the moments are too few, and every second she spends away from her wife's side she hears that death-rattle as her beloved ape loses the fight to breathe.

**Sickness**

It can be beaten, especially with the arrival of a drained and subdued time-travelling archaeologist with antibiotics and fond wishes from the 51st century.

**Jealousy**

It's petty and horrible to even be thinking such things when a child's life hangs in the balance, but they have weeks before they'll arrive at Demon's Run and all of these Silurians have known Vastra since she was a hatchling, and really what is there to hold her to Jenny when she's here among her own kind?

**Promise**

The Doctor, Vastra supposes (with no small amount of exasperation) as they're running about Sweetville and their lovely case has turned to Time Lord chaos, always does keep his promises eventually; still, they had waited in that graveyard for at least six hours and if they get out of this alive she's going to tie him up and tell Strax to give him an in-depth briefing about Moonites.

**Blood**

"Next time you get the brilliant idea to do your fightin' under a giant glass dome," Jenny hisses as Vastra attempts to extract what feels like half the conservatory ceiling from her lover's skin, "I'm like to cut you to pieces first an' save Strax the trouble."

**Confusion**

Five years after his arrival, Strax still has trouble with genders.

**Tears**

Jenny's seen death before, known loss before; but Clara's run was never meant to be this short, she'd been meant for so very much _more_, and Jenny is glad of Vastra's gloved hand in hers and the Silurian's reassuring presence at her side as it rains.

**Home**

It's horribly drafty in the winter despite all their attempts at weatherproofing, none of the china matches because when Strax isn't breaking it Vastra is and when Vastra's not breaking it the entire china cabinet is being knocked over by aliens; it's odd and mismatched and there are laser burns in the curtains from Strax being Strax, but it's theirs.

**Ice**

It's a shame, Jenny reflects as they usher the Lattimers away from the windows and set up a preliminary battle plan to protect the house against an army of sentient, malicious snowmen; she used to _like_ ice-skating.

**Gravity**

After the third week in which the Doctor makes no contact whatsoever, Jenny gets worried enough to take him supper and tries very, very hard not to look down.

**Chocolate**

Vastra has no idea how human courtship rituals are supposed to work, but she knows this can't be right; what could possibly be romantic about providing your mate with sugary toxins? (The Doctor later explains that unlike Silurians, human digestive systems are capable of handling chocolate without being poisoned; by then she has discovered that Jenny doesn't like chocolate anyway.)

**Scars**

You don't go into their line of work without getting a few scars; Jenny has a starburst through her palm from a nasty shard of glass, a laser burn on her hip from the incident with the Sontarans that Strax doesn't like talking about, and a jaggedly healed knife wound at her side that had bought her a whole week in bed (which she found excessive) being fussed over by Vastra (which she found rather wonderful actually but will never admit it).

**Technology**

The Doctor grins expectantly at her as she stops short upon entering the TARDIS for the first time ("Go on, say it, we've got enough time for that!") and seems oddly put out when Jenny's first words are a rather shaky "Where shall I put the cases, ma'am?"

**Waves**

One winter when Vastra is exceedingly bored and her violin has been accidentally turned into firewood she reverse-engineers the Doctor's screwdriver; it lacks the vast majority of his settings, as she's not had millennia of boredom to tinker with it, but it works on wood.

**Hair**

Half the time Jenny thinks that Vastra may well have married her for her hair, until winter comes and she remembers that no, Vastra actually married her for her tea.

**Weakness**

"Do try not to get kidnapped, Jenny," Vastra says one day. Jenny assumes she's only just realized what a liability it is to have a human housemaid running about after her on her adventures; "No," Vastra says idly, "Only it looks like a very busy week. It would be terribly inconsiderate of you to put anyone else in the morgue."

**Devotion**

One of their cases goes sour enough that Jenny's family is taken as hostages; she rescues them of course, because they're her family, but she doesn't stop Vastra from placing a sword at her father's throat and telling him exactly how he will die if he attempts to interfere in Jenny's life against her wishes.

**Loss**

Sometimes a victory comes with too high a cost; yes, yes, they tracked down a band of legendary bank robbers that had been plaguing Scotland Yard for five years but that had been Vastra's_ favorite hat_ they ruined.

**Innocence**

Inspector Abberline is what Jenny's mother would call 'a dear', well-meaning and honest if a bit slow... but really, it's more than 'a bit' when Vastra makes it a point to never split apart from her wife on a case without kissing her goodbye, and the man has still yet to catch on.

**Pain**

You don't go into their line of work without picking up a few scars, and Jenny has her share, but there's one that hurts more than any of the others—a thin stripe down her back, barely visible unless you know it's there, that had once been the deepest of the many blows of a horsewhip laid down by her father the first time she'd been caught with a pretty Irish housemaid.

**Death**

They manage to save Strax at Demon's Run; the Judoon and the human pilots are returned to their own time and place, the Ponds are... recovering; but the brave Silurian warriors who had followed Vastra into battle for a cause that was not their own never make it home, and it's not her fault but she feels their loss all the same.

**Hands**

For all the jokes that could be made about her incredible tongue, it was Vastra's hands... oh _god_ her hands, gentle and quick and rough in all the right places... that Jenny liked the most.

**Speed**

Vastra and Jenny long ago accepted that the vast majority of their interaction would be good-natured bickering; Vastra sprawls arrogantly over the couch while Jenny rants and raves about something trivial she doesn't really care about, and as she storms overdramatically out of the room Vastra's tongue whips out and pulls her around by the wrist and she stumbles and elbows her in the face on the way down, which serves the old lizard right.

**Smile**

It also sends Jenny tumbling into her lap, so Vastra doesn't much care about the elbow to the face and doesn't bother trying to hide it; Jenny sticks her tongue out and pouts, but two can play at that game and Vastra's tongue is much more impressive.

**Gift**

Vastra doesn't realize how long she's been running, how hounded she is by the past and the world, until for the first time a wild-eyed half-starved ape sees her face and doesn't flinch, and for the first time she feels like maybe she has something to run _to_.

**Flame**

In the midst of the action and Strax and the adrenaline and Strax and the split-second life-or-death cases and Strax, there are also times like this, curled at opposite ends of a comfortable sofa in front of the fireplace, with Vastra reading and Jenny copying down their case notes for Doctor Doyle and absolutely nothing that needs worrying over.

**Melody**

Jenny's not possessive, she's _not_, she trusts Vastra completely and she is fully aware that a little harmless flirting never hurt anyone, and _why Doctor Song, I have no idea why on earth I brought out a cleaver instead of a cheese knife, my mind must be going…_

**Soft**

Vastra puts a gentle arm around her waist after River has left, pulls her wife close and presses a lingering kiss to her temple; she is a foolish old lizard, she says with a smile, that may be true, but really, Jenny, as if there could ever be anyone but you!

**Forever**

There are a thousand and one things that should have kept them apart, and at least as many more that are determined to part them in the future; Jenny knows perfectly well that her wife will outlive her by centuries, even if they can avoid the myriad of unsavory characters that will be attempting to murder them for the forseeable future. But if the Doctor is right about one thing it's that hope is really very human; Vastra's eyes sparkle like forever and Jenny can almost believe it.


End file.
